2008/09/27

I've been interested in learning to program Ruby for quite some time now, but my life has been too hectic to find the time. Now that my life is starting to calm down more I will have the free time to start programming again and learn Ruby. Since I have a great deal of experience programming in general, it should be rather painless and quick to learn Ruby. I naturally learn pretty quickly anyway, so it should work out pretty well.

The way I learn is by doing, so I need a project to work on as I learn. I couldn't really think of anything to do while I learn Ruby. That is, until recently as I was going through a list of Nintendo DS games. The way the scene names or labels each released game makes it nearly impossible to find the game you want without just going through the entire list, because they are named first by the release number and then the game's name. So the files are sorted alphanumerically and the first four characters are the number of the release which makes alphabetical sorting useless. So my thought then was to create a simple program that will extract certain parameters from the filenames such as the actual name of the game and release number, etc. and create and maintain a searchable database of all this information and even update the database as new games are released. It could even be coded to work the other way as well (once the database is at least mostly complete), where a misnamed file can be renamed appropriately and so on. Anyway, I plan on working on something like this as I teach myself Ruby. The program would start out simplistic at first and progressively become more useful as I go.

So there will be some posts upcoming soon with more detail on what I have planned for that project.